I received my PhD in animal behaviour from the University of Toronto in 1971, and for the next 25 years, I studied the behavioural ecology of desert rodents, namely gerbils in the Algerian Sahara and kangaroo rats in California.

In 1977, my late wife Margo Wilson and I began a program of "epidemiological" research on human violence, applying the basic evolutionary theories that we used in our nonhuman research - the theories of inclusive fitness, sexual selection and sexual conflict - to human beings. This enabled us to identify predictable sources of variability among individuals in domains like marital conflict, parental care, risk-taking, and disregard for the long-term future, and to generate testable hypotheses about who is more or less likely to kill whom, when, and why. This research program has produced many striking results about major risk factors for lethal violence including recent marital separation, step-family relationships, ages and age disparities, and economic inequality.